OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
7:55 AM – Tuesday, June 9, 2026
Vice President JD Vance has decided to refer Democrat Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for a criminal fraud investigation after the House Oversight Committee published its findings from an investigation.
On Monday evening, the vice president, who was tapped this year to be the Trump administration’s “Fraud Czar,” shared a letter addressed to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald on X.
“I’ve referred these allegations to DOJ’s new Fraud Division for criminal investigation. Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimated whistleblowers, they must face justice,” Vance stated.
In the letter, he referenced the report, entitled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion,” that he and McDonald both received from Oversight Committee Chair Representative James Comer (R-Ky.).
The 54-page report, published Monday, found “a consistent pattern: fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible signs of fraud emerged.”
The committee concluded the following allegations, according to the vice president:
- Senior officials under Walz’s (D-Minn.) administration were “aware of credible, systemic fraud concerns in social services programs as early as 2019,” though public statements by the governor later suggested otherwise.
- Governor Walz “retaliated against employees who tried to raise concerns, going to great lengths to keep them quiet, including intimidation” such as “threats of surveillance.”
- Walz and Ellison’s failures resulted in “an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds to be lost or placed at serious risk.”
- Stolen funds most likely “ended up in the hands of international terrorist networks and certainly funded the lavish lifestyles of criminal fraudsters.”
“Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison clearly did not protect taxpayer dollars, but it is still an open question as to whether this was incompetence, willful blindness, or worse,” the report says in its conclusion.
Vance reminded the assistant attorney general, as well as the public, that President Donald Trump’s order to form the Fraud Task Force demands that these Minnesota politicians be further investigated and brought to justice, as fraudsters “didn’t just steal from the taxpayer, they prevented children, the elderly, and those most in need of help from receiving critical services.”
“I am confident that, under your leadership, the Justice Department will respond to this referral and to Chairman Comer’s report with all appropriate urgency,” Vance’s letter concluded.
Walz, former Vice President Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee in 2024, announced in January that he would not be seeking reelection amid widespread fraud accusations in his state.
The next month, the Trump administration withheld $259.5 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota.
Last month, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against 15 alleged fraudsters accused of siphoning more than $90 million in funding for state-managed Medicaid programs. One defendant billed the federal government for 24-hour care that he was not actually providing to his patient, and the patient was later found dead, according to the DOJ. Two other defendants billed Medicaid for services that were never provided to children who may not have even been properly diagnosed with autism.
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